Comment Not too hot but not too cold either (Score 1) 1233
About 22-25C. Shorts and shirts.
About 22-25C. Shorts and shirts.
Alright I post this as someone who wasn't really interested in the DC or most of SEGA until fairly recently. But I can probably provide some insight into what SEGA has become in the recent years, which pretty much match the thoughts of this man.
Two years ago I started playing Phantasy Star Universe, the successor to Phantasy Star Online. Many people know about PSO which was one of the first MMO so I don't feel the need to explain that many people had huge expectations for the game. But management killed its potential and the lifetime of the game is just a flow of bad decisions.
First error was to build hype around the game (as they do with all their games, and they do it pretty well) only to release it with next to nothing to do online. A couple missions, that's it. You could play everything from the beginning and be done in a day. Then you could replay them over and over to reach the cap. Pretty poor for an online game. Why did they do that? Because they didn't have much content and they wanted to make it last as long as possible. Every two weeks or so they release maybe a new mission (or a new difficulty of an existing mission) that includes "new items" that were available on the original disc. 3 years after the release they still have a handful of items from the original disc they never released. Frustration and quitting ensue.
What does that tells us? That they made as little investment as possible with the hope to make it last long enough to collect many monthly fees. They also got a substantial amount of money by selling the discs (original game and expansion).
Now I won't bore you with more of the many details about this game and will go on to one of the last chapter. Recently they added a cash shop (in addition of the monthly fee and the price of the game). This cash shop doesn't give your usual items like EXP or drop boosts though. Through the cash shop you can obtain many exclusivity including: the best weapons in the game for almost each category (account bound, can't be traded), cool clothes available on the original disc, a service to upgrade your weapons and armors in a way that gives a huge advantage to those who do, etc. In other words, they went and made playing the game almost pointless because you can just buy everything you need. It's also expensive. Frustration and people quitting ensue.
This feature gives them an additional revenue stream that gives them money "right now" despite being immensely negative on the game later on. Because the end-game at this point was still to improve your character. Now there's no more end-game, therefore no reason to play after you buy what you need.
Those two points show that they don't have a long term goal. They're only trying to find cheap ways to get the maximum money without investing much. Instead of using the old method of building a great game and making your customers happy.
They can do that because of their old reputation and their extensive hype-building skills. Old fans always look forward to the next game even if the previous wasn't all that good.
So yes, the indie developer feeling isn't there. The management and marketing feeling is very strong though.
All images look like crap because of the recompression. I can only assume that they will fine-tune the compression during the beta stage based on people's input. I didn't try it on flash but it's understandable that there might be a few problems there. While the technology has been widely tested for mobile browsers (Opera Mini), it hasn't for desktop usage yet. For everything that doesn't work on Opera Mini (like Flash) problems are to be expected.
Now here's the interesting part, and I really wish they will allow this. Take your favorite heavy website (Slashdot for example). Enable Turbo and it'll load pages 2 to 3 times faster. That's pretty nice considering how long it can take to load some of the pages sometimes. You don't really lose anything from the compression, Slashdot is 99% text. So having Turbo enabled on that kind of site would be a big improvement, even on a desktop with DSL. Unfortunately they don't allow per-site settings yet, so you can't enable Turbo only on Slashdot. But if they add per-site configuration, then all those and only those annoyingly slow and heavy websites would take 2 to 3 times less time to load for Opera users. I certainly hope they will.
I assume you refer to this: http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/
(mods: no need to mod up here I've already posted this link in a post above)
I use this: http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/
It took one minute to copy the file, and I didn't see any ad since then.
My only ritual is that if I find a bug or a problem that I can't resolve in less than 5 minutes I take a few hours off. After a while I get back to it and am usually able to resolve it without much trouble.
The interesting part of Touhou, related to this story, is that the lore isn't really created by the author. As you said, he only makes a basic framework, and then the community builds upon it in the fanworks (which aren't restricted at all and can be sold freely, as opposed to other IP). The community creates various meme about the characters and the world itself which are sometimes taken back into the following games. The fans are contributing to the canon story.
The IP from TFS are usually entirely controlled by their owners and such a dynamic cannot exist. Fans don't have any choice than hope the production won't butcher their favorite show/game. Also note that ZUN (the author) can avoid putting details because the games are mostly gameplay oriented. Other games or stories don't have this chance.
What's interesting is the amount of fanwork coming from the Touhou franchise, compared to others. There is literally thousands of fanmade CDs released and sold containing remixes of the original music. Some of the most popular tracks of the games have thousands of remixes themselves. All of this in a span of 6 years. All thanks to a healthy doujin community that can exist because the IP owner doesn't try to control everything.
Instead, the IP owner actually take back some things from the community and add them to the canon lore, as we saw with a few characters in recent games.
NetBSD is often used for research. See http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html for the most important ones.
Imagine an MMO where healing becomes obsolete because items became so powerful that nothing (short of a player wielded weapon) can harm a tank. Dedicated healer classes would certainly feel unbalanced and "useless". Now, instead of making healers important again, they're giving a boost to their damage spell lines and are told to behave like offensive casters. That's not what I made. I made a healer. If I wanted a damage caster, I would have made one.
That's basically what happened on Phantasy Star Universe (one of the worst balanced game I ever saw, by the way). The healer class became completely obsolete because healing items were cheap, the missions short and it's fairly easy to avoid getting damage. Then they reduced the price of the healing items. With such a cheap price and the fact that the items are instantaneous compared to the delay caused by the reaction time + the healing animation, healing spells became useless. Their buffs are only slightly better than buff items, making having one of these in your party a waste of place. To compensate they boosted a bit the attacks of this class, but even with that they're far from being as efficient as melee or ranged. And few people wants one in their party. The GMs had to go as far as requiring a healer in each party for their events, to make things "fair" for everyone.
And well, I'm not even talking about how much they broke the game with the melee changes...
It is indeed funny but that's quite possibly one of the reasons that makes it be faster. The more you support, the slower it gets and the more you have to optimize to get the same speed as a less complete implementation.
Their claims won't have much value until they get to the same level of standard support as the other browsers.
My bad, I didn't know there was something like this. Thanks for the link.
Most reviews don't get it and I'm sure a lot of people are mistaken about it, but even if Opera doesn't support "addons" they support a lot more than just adding widgets.
You can customize any and all Opera INI files. There is extensive resources about it. For a few examples, you can:
Of course the INI files are part of your profile so editing them won't affect other users. And I'm not even mentioning the per-site configuration.
Opera doesn't need addons IMHO. It's already really heavily configurable.
I understand some people can't do without AdBlock or a few other addons, so no need to mention it, we know you need it. But for the others there's more than enough functionality available through customization.
My bad, I didn't intend to submit this here. I made a wrong click when submitting the news at sourceforge. Sorry. The software just reached beta, is not ready for production, and most of all I don't believe it is slashdot worthy. Nothing to see here, folks. Sorry again.
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones
